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Over the weekend, we had the exciting opportunity to meet up with another local chocolate maker. Dave Huston of Confluence Chocolate, who lives up in Sacramento, agreed to come down to the Bay Area for a visit. We met at Bittersweet Cafe, and drank some absolutely delicious hot chocolates (similar to what’s offered at Dandelion). I recommend the Spicy hot chocolate!

We met up with Dave to chat about life as hobbyist chocolate-makers, to share stories of how chocolate sweetens our lives and get to know each other. I know… cheesy. And it was wonderful! Imagine if you could meet someone else who has the same strange hobby that fills your weekends and evenings! Yes, we learned a lot, but more importantly, we met a new chocolate buddy. As per the trend, people in the small batch bean-to-bar industry are awesome!

So, what did we learn exactly?

First of all, we have some new equipment ideas that will make our process even more streamlined and will increase our ability to consistently make good chocolate. Specifically, Dave recommended:

the Behmor 1600 Plus roaster – we’ve heard this before, specifically in Eugene with John Nanci. This will likely be our next investment in chocolate!

Chocovision Revolation x3210 tempering machine – this is a big one, so we’ll see! On the one hand, I feel like we should get good at table tempering before we buy a machine to do it for us, honing our skills in the craft of chocolate-making. On the other hand, I’m very tempted to buy a machine that almost every chocolate-maker uses to make their process more exact and repeatable.

a vibrating table for molding – this would reduce bubbles in our bars and improve the shine on both sides of the bar.

a 140 CC syringe for molding (see Cal Vet Supply) – genius! This would reduce a lot of loss we currently have from transferring chocolate between bowls with a ladle. And it would minimize the mess. Love it!

He also recommended attending the Good Food Awards & the FCIA event in January. We’ve heard this before and are even more excited now. Networking with the chocolate industry greats there will be quite a treat!

We are considering gathering a larger group of local chocolate makers early next year, to discuss best practices. Locally, we have so many amazing human beings who are also amazing chocolate-makers! Just in the Bay Area, besides industry giant, Guittard in Burlingame, there are:

There has been a lot of news recently regarding the world chocolate shortage. Some sources are stating that there will be a 1 million MT deficit in chocolate by 2020. The ICCO denies that projection, adding that this year actually showed a 40,000 MT surplus of chocolate.

A few factors certainly could contribute to a shortage of chocolate overall in the world. Note the emphasis on overall. If we’re to take the chocolate shortage claims seriously, we must include all the factors that could contribute. According to All Day, those factors could include:

Environmental factors: frosty pod and dry weather in West Africa

Health & political factors: shutting borders between Liberia & Guinea with the Ivory Coast due to Ebola

Local economic factors:farmers choosing rubber instead of cacao, and farmers are aging but the younger generation has not indicated its interest in continuing to farm cacao

Global economic factors: increased demand in China & India: by 29%

Global demand factors: consumers are interested in darker chocolate, which has a higher cacao percentage

As a result of the increase in demand and decrease in supply, there are a few consequences that also could contribute to a reduction of chocolate in our lives:

Prices: prices would go up (basic economics), making chocolate less accessible to the general population

GMOs: Chocolate companies are working on synthetic cacao trees, which would be more resistant to disease but less complex in their taste

Chocolate substitutes: Chocolate makers may begin filling their products with more nuts, fruits, etc. rather than providing straight chocolate

Now let’s take a step back and think about how that affects bean-to-bar makers who engage in direct trade or fair trade with the farmers who produce the cacao…

The bottom line is: very little!

Harriet Lamb, CEO of Fair Trade International, writes her solution to this potential shortage in The Guardian:

To prevent a chocolate shortage, farmers need to earn a better income now… This is the critical next leap that the chocolate sector needs to make. We need to pay farmers more for their cocoa today if we want to keep them farming for tomorrow. Our very chocolate depends on it.

In other words, small batch chocolate-makers like Askinosie and SpagNvola are already working in this way and will be less affected by a potential shortage. It’s the large chocolate companies that produce chocolate in bulk who need to learn from their bean-to-bar peers. In fact, those with branch-to-bar strategies are even more convincing. If the chocolate-makers absorb a higher percentage of the cost, then farmers will be better paid and more highly incentivized to produce the best cacao they can.

There are a few caveats. This policy could end up increasing the cost of chocolate to the consumer. If so, it could lose one of the principles of Slow Food: though it would be fair to the farmer, it would not necessarily be accessible to the average consumer. Additionally, as long as the new consumers in China and India could pay for it, this policy would not quite address the increase in demand. That said, most of the bean-to-bar market already focuses on higher-end consumers, providing a higher quality product at a higher price point than mainstream chocolate bars.

So, should the conscientious bean-to-bar chocolate-maker worry about a chocolate shortage? Our answer: just a little bit. And at the same time, take advantage of this new opportunity to share the practices that could alleviate a shortage in the future and simultaneously support the farmers!

To read more about the potential chocolate shortage, see the articles below:

It’s been about 8 months since we starting playing around with chocolate. And in that time, we’ve collected quite a bit of equipment, tools, and ingredients that now fill an entire area of our apartment. We like to call that area our Chocolate Factory.

We started with just a bag of cocoa beans from the Grand Central Market in LA and some white cane sugar. From our very first coffee grinder to the old fashioned grain mill to the melanger we use today, we’ve gone through more than a few iterations of our process.

I’d like to show off a little about our current set-up, in the hopes that it will be useful to other chocolate-makers or aspiring chocolate-makers out there!

Let’s start with our documentation board. Here’s where we keep track of our batch sizes, temperatures, and results. We also keep a list of interesting R&D ideas that come to mind.

Documentation board

Then we have our new peg board system that Richard built from Home Depot parts, where we store tools like thermometers, spatulas, molds, and safety goggles. We’re also intending to try out a new storage method for our finished chocolate. The Rubbermaids are drying out after an initial cleanse before we stuff them with chocolate bars! And finally, the beautiful homemade quartz table is for tempering.

Peg board & storage

Here we have our current chocolate storage system. Have I mentioned we’re in the market for a wine fridge? We realize this method isn’t quite sustainable at our rate of churning out delicious chocolate bars!

Chocolate shelves

What’s a chocolate factory without some fun decorations? Check out our map, where we intend to document the origins of the chocolate we’re producing. And this is our awesome cocoa bean bag given to us by John Nanci of Chocolate Alchemy, when we visited Eugene last month.

Wall decorations – cocoa bean bag & wall map

Here’s our fun bean cooling station, handmade by engineer Richard. I’m excited to use this for our next batch!

Bean cooling system

Our shelves full of tools, beans, and documentation, are topped by our beautiful Premier Wonder Grinder, one of the key pieces of equipment in our process. We also have a gorgeous marble display slab, which we bring to parties to show off our different varieties.

Shelves & Premier Wonder Grinder

Our winnower, still very much a work in progress, has developed since the last time I photographed it. We now have an additional entrance spout and a much stronger shopvac than our home vacuum. Hold onto your horses, because a guest post from the engineer will provide more detail on the winnower soon!

Winnower

And last but not least, a good chocolate factory must provide inspiration and guidance to its chocolate-makers. Take a look at our chocolate library to see what we’re reading these days. The books lean heavily toward entrepreneurship & chocolate science!

What do these all mean and which ones should you pay attention to when you’re choosing your chocolate? Good question! Some relate to labor practices, others relate to the environmental circumstances surrounding the farming.

Now let’s talk about the external certifications that can factor into your decisions around chocolate purchases and consumption. I’m not going to claim that one certification is better than another or that any one of these means your chocolate is sustainably produced and sourced, but let’s go into what each of them mean.

Fair Trade

This label certifies that the farmers and workers involved in creating the product are fairly compensated for their work and have favorable working conditions. The specifics of this definition differ across agencies and can, like organic certification, entail costly and time-intensive processes to adhere to. That said, the theory behind fair trade is a positive one.

For chocolate, fair trade mandates a minimum price for cocoa beans and includes components of community development and direct trade. The first chocolate bar to have the label, “fair trade” was Green & Black’s Maya Gold in 1994.

Rainforest Alliance

“The Rainforest Alliance works to conserve biodiversity and improve livelihoods by promoting and evaluating the implementation of the most globally respected sustainability standards in a variety of fields.” The Rainforst Alliance certifications confirm that particular products are farmed and produced in a way that protects rainforest environments. Again, the cost of obtaining and maintaining this certification can be high for small farmers, but Rainforest Alliance is working to provide mutual benefit to the rainforests and the farmers.

Their work with cacao has involved supporting farmer communities by training them to conserve natural resources, protecting land and waterways by teaching farmers practices that conserve their land and plants while also productively harvesting cacao, and finally improving incomes by connecting farmers to markets that are willing to pay higher prices for certified chocolate.

UTZ

UTZ certification is specific to coffee, cocoa, and tea and was started in the late 1990s. UTZ-certified coffee, cocoa, and tea follow a set of guidelines that take a big-picture view of social, environmental, and economic issues. The Codes of Conduct require better farming methods, better working conditions, better care for nature, and better care for future generations. As a result, UTZ certification pushes toward better crops, better income, better environment, and a better life.

Direct Trade

The simplest definition of direct trade is when a chocolate-maker buys cocoa beans directly from a cacao farmer. Some say this method is the most fair and sustainable – better than fair trade certification (which costs the farmers money). However, it does not necessarily account for the environment or the complications that arise from importing beans directly from cacao farmers. Some recent articles from Yes Magazine and Relevant Magazine go into more depth on the subject of direct trade for cocoa beans.

In January of 2012, a group of chocolate-makers, cacao farmers, and chocolate industry gurus visited Honduran Island, Guanaja, and founded the membership-only group, Direct Cacao, which is dedicated to giving “a voice to chocolate makers, chocolatiers, independent tasters and other in the chocolate industry working with and supporting directly sourced fine cacao, and to the cacao growers supplying the cacao.”

For more information on some of the chocolate makers who use direct trade, check out the links below:

What do these all mean and which ones should you pay attention to when you’re choosing your chocolate? Good question! Some relate to labor practices, others relate to the environmental circumstances surrounding the farming.

I’m not going to claim that one certification is better than another or that any one of these means your chocolate is sustainably produced and sourced, but let’s go into what each of them mean.

Organic

“The organic standards describe the specific requirements that must be verified by a USDA-accredited certifying agent before products can be labeled USDA organic. Overall, organic operations must demonstrate that they are protecting natural resources, conserving biodiversity, and using only approved substances.” Read more about the definition on the National Organic Program page of the USDA.

There are quite a few regulations involved in obtaining and maintaining this certification, including fees, inspections, and a waiting period, among others. The processes can be onerous for very small family farms, which is where most fine chocolate is grown. That said, many small farms refrain from using expensive pesticides and are considered “de facto” organic, even if they do not have official certification.

Local

Eating local chocolate is a difficult concept for those of us who do not live within 20 degrees of the equator. Cocoa beans traditionally come from tropical places close to the equator. The only US state that naturally produces cacao is Hawaii. For chocolate to truly be local, its beans must grow in the same place as the chocolate production, which would all be the same place as the consumer taking that delicious bite of chocolate. You can find truly local chocolate at a few places, including the following:

Single Origin

Single origin chocolate is another label that you may find on your favorite chocolate bar. This means that the cocoa beans that constitute the bar you’re eating all come from the same country. They may even come from the same region or co-op or farm, but those parts are not guaranteed. Remember that the genetics vary even within the same cocoa pod? Well, there’s also wide variety among beans from a single country, not to mention region.

Valhrona made this concept popular more than two decades ago. The trend is still going strong! In fact, one of our favorite chocolate-makers, Dandelion, makes purely single origin bars. The logic behind single origin bars comes from the concept of terrior, borrowed from the wine industry. Beans take on a flavor based on the environment in which they grew, fermented, and dried.

Last week, we made a batch of chocolate from some very special beans. They are Carupano Corona from Venezuela, 2014. The Chocolate Alchemist describes them as “Criollo/Trinitario with clove and soft fruity high notes and very low bitterness.”

And the exciting part – John Nanci roasted them right there in his workshop with us watching (and smelling) on! In his homemade roaster with temperature gauges inside the drum roaster and in the oven itself, these beans smelled amazing. I’ll write another post just on his roasting style and tricks, but for now, suffice it to say that it was quite an experience!

John Nanci’s homemade roaster

With these beans that Richard describes as spiced, we’ve made our most recent batch of chocolate. Since we brought them back from Oregon in our suitcases (we’re shocked that TSA did not even double check our bags full of cocoa beans), they had almost 5 days to cool after being roasted in Eugene. We used the winnower Richard has been working on (guest post to come soon) with a slightly lower vacuum power and ended up with an incredibly 80% yield of nibs! We did a little hand sorting after roasting, which resulted in this beautiful picture (if I do say so myself!).

Venezuelan cocoa nibs

We put the 802 grams of nibs into the Premier Wonder Grinder at 7:45pm on Wednesday night and added 283 grams of sugar as soon as the nibs had taken their liquid form. Thanks for the advice in your comments, Dave and Olivier and Ritual Chocolate! The grinder ran overnight, smelling delicious and creating that white noise that puts us to sleep.

Thursday evening, we added the two new ingredients – soy lecithin (0.9 grams) and cocoa butter (50 grams) – and waited another hour and a half before pulling out the chocolate to temper. With these ingredients, our final chocolate is 75% cocoa mass + cocoa butter, assuming a 50% cocoa butter content in the beans themselves. See more on our two new ingredients here.

Venezuelan chocolate liquor – yum!

Tempering is now the trickiest part. I brought the temperature up to 128 in the microwave, then lowered it to 122 by stirring continuously before pouring it onto our tempering table. I agitated the liquor (which was quite liquidy) for maybe 5-10 minutes while it dropped in temperature. It dropped to 82 on the tempering table and I raised it quickly to 90 with just a few seconds in the microwave. Then, I poured the liquor out into the molds, filling them faster than we’ve done before and shaking them by hand to raise all the tiny air bubbles.

bloomed Venezuelan chocolate

The final product – 947 grams of 75% Venezuelan chocolate! The final taste is amazing – almost savory with the fruity spicey flavor of the beans coming through and the mellow earthy tones from the cocoa butter. The texture is crisp and smooth – no grains and with a solid break. Visually is where we’re still having issues. As I mentioned earlier in the week, the lecithin and cocoa butter did not prevent the white swirls of fat bloom from occurring. I felt great about getting the temperatures right the first time.

A challenge to the small scale chocolate makers of the world… what do you recommend? The one who provides the tip(s) that results in successfully tempered and bloom-less chocolate gets a prize!*

*exact prize TBD, but it might just be a shipped sample of our finished chocolate of your choice!

One of the areas of innovation in chocolate where we have not yet ventured is that of ingredients. Well, that’s not totally true… When we first started out, we tried a bacon batch, but we added way too much bacon. Another time, we tried a salted chocolate batch, but we added way too much salt. (Noticing a trend?) We’ve strayed away from new ingredients since then.

However, our visit to John Nanci in Oregon taught us many things. One of them was the appropriate use of cocoa butter and soy lecithin. Cocoa butter is the fat of the cocoa bean. Most beans have about a 50% cocoa butter content compared to cocoa mass, though the percentage varies by genetics, origin, and even roast profile (which can dry out the beans). See John Nanci’s post on cocoa butter percentages here.

The percentage you see on many chocolate bars is an indicator of the amount of cocoa butter + cocoa mass in the bar. That means a bar that advertises 70% could have 20% cocoa mass and 50% cocoa butter or the opposite: 50% cocoa mass and 20% cocoa butter. It is not required for chocolate makers to publish the amount of mass vs. butter on their bars. You can read more about this complicated practice in Clay Gordon’s post on The Chocolate Life.

It was that discovery that led us to stick with just two ingredients up until now, for the most part: cocoa beans (natural combination of both cocoa butter and cocoa mass) and sugar. However, John asked us a tricky question as we stood in his workshop, waiting for a batch of beans to roast: “Which will taste more chocolatey – a bar with 55% cocoa butter or a bar with 50% cocoa butter?”

Richard and I looked at each other, understanding this was a trick question. I ventured, “They taste the same amount of chocolatey?”

John laughed and informed us that cocoa butter actually provides more chocolatey flavor than the chocoa mass! We were very surprised, which is why we’re making our very first batch with the addition of cocoa butter now. Cocoa butter also should help smooth out the cocoa liquor, making it easier to temper and pour into molds.

50 grams of cocoa butter

The other ingredient, soy lecithin, has the effect of reducing the viscocity of chocolate liquor, causing similar results as cocoa butter – making the chocolate easier to pour and temper. Its added benefits include preventing bloom (related to its tempering improvements) and increasing the shelf life of the final chocolate. All of this has to do with improving the tempering process. There’s some controversy, since it’s basically a soy byproduct and not a natural part of chocolate, but we decided to try it out to see how it really works…

After some research, we’ve noted that most people recommend adding the cocoa butter and soy lecithin an hour or so before refining is complete. Since we started at 7:45pm on Wednesday night, we added the melted cocoa butter and soy lecithin around that time Thursday evening, and pulled it out of the Premier Wonder Grinder shortly afterwards. We read that the soy lecithin should only be in the melanger for up to 2 hours, or else it will grind out all its properties.

The result? A delicious and creamy chocolate with a slightly more chocolatey flavor, as John Nanci promised! The jury’s still out on whether these ingredients contribute toward reducing bloom and improving temper, since our chocolate still has the telltale streaks of fat bloom. What do you think about using these extra ingredients? Are we diluting the final product or are we adding functional benefits? Comment with your thoughts!